Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Research Scientist
This month’s linguistics jobs interview is with Jeff Lilly, a Research Scientist at Cobalt Speech and Language. In this interview, Jeff shares how opportunities in computational linguistics have evolved since he received his degree, and how pursuing his interests in linguistics and computers have influenced his career.
You can find Jeff online on LinkedIn, or on either of his two blogs: druidjournal.net (on nature-centered spirituality) and axonfirings.com (on his fiction projects).
What did you study at university?
I have a BA in Linguistics from UNC-Chapel Hill (1995) and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Maryland, College Park (2000). UMD allowed me to qualify for the masters with two papers, so I did one paper on the lexical semantics of telic verbs and another on the typology of language games.
What is your job?
At Cobalt Speech and Language, it's a small company, so lots of us wear many hats. I design dialogue systems, build natural language understanding models and applications, and perform testing and quality assurance. I'm also in charge of Cobalt's ASR lexicons (the dictionaries we use for our speech systems).
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
Linguistics is central to what I do, and I'm always trying to find new ways to incorporate linguistic knowledge into our tools. Most people working in speech technology come from a computer science background, so they're unaware of the variety of linguistic theories that can be brought to bear on our work. Any speech technology model is a mix of raw data, effective architecture, and linguistic knowledge; the more of one you have, the less of the others you need. By contributing linguistic knowledge, I can make our models smaller and simpler, and make them faster and easier to train. For example, I built a syllabification module based on Optimality Theory that is critical to our text-to-speech software. It works for any language and never needs to be trained on new data.
What was the transition from university to work like for you?
As I worked on my master's degree, I took as many computer science courses as I could handle. I got extra experience working with databases on the side. I was hired by a small search company shortly after I graduated (helping to build out the WordNet database), working primarily as a linguist, but my experience and classes in databases helped establish my abilities as a coder. When that company failed, I was able to join my next company as a research scientist / computational linguist, and I've been building my programming skill on the job ever since.
Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I guess one thing I had to learn the hard way is that the "real world" evaluates your performance much differently than school does. At school, you can just learn the material, turn in good papers, do well on the exams, and you're golden. But oftentimes on the job, your managers don't know you're doing a good job unless you make yourself visible by speaking up in meetings, offering suggestions, volunteering for tasks, etc. It's often better to try and fail than to keep your head down and play it safe.
Any other thoughts or comments?
When I started out as a linguistics undergrad in 1991, the profession of "computational linguist" barely existed. But I knew I loved linguistics and I was fascinated by computers, so I just tried to follow my passion, hoping that my enthusiasm and hard work would make up for any lack of ability or job prospects. It has not been a smooth ride -- I've worked at almost a dozen companies in the past 20 years, been laid off more than once, had to move across the country multiple times, etc. But I've always gotten to work on fascinating projects with amazing people. For example, I was on the first tiny team to start building Alexa at Amazon in 2011. And I've continued to stretch and grow and learn in ways I'd never imagined. 20 years from now, building on the remarkable recent advances in language modeling, the field will be vastly different. I hope, for example, that there will be opportunities for computational linguists to peel back the layers of a system like GPT-3 and see how it has modeled human language. It's going to be incredibly exciting.
Related interviews:
Interview with a Language Engineer
Interview with a Natural Language Annotation Lead
Interview with a Computational Linguist
Interview with a Learning Scientist
Interview with a Data Scientist
Recent interviews:
Interview with a Language Engineer
Interview with a Natural Language Annotation Lead
Interview with an EMLS/Linguistics instructor & mother of four
Interview with a Performing Artiste and Freelance Editor
Resources:
The full Linguist Jobs Interview List
The Linguist Jobs tag for the most recent interviews
The Linguistics Jobs slide deck (overview, resources and activities)
The Linguistics Jobs Interview series is edited by Martha Tsutsui Billins. Martha is a linguist whose research focuses on the Ryukyuan language Amami Oshima, specifically honourifics and politeness strategies in the context of language endangerment. Martha runs Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork.
